Bound for Canaan Read Free Page B

they might never engage personally in illegal activity, protected those who did and made it possible for them to continue their work. Although cell-like in structure, the underground resembled the Communist Party much less than it did the Internet. Where danger was immediate, and proslavery forces strong, few who were involved in the underground knew the names of collaborators farther away than the next town or two. In ardently abolitionist areas, however, it was less a secret movement than it was a public one that kept its activities secret only from its enemies. “The method of operating was not uniform but adapted to the requirements of each case,” as Isaac Beck, an underground stationmaster in southern Ohio, put it. “There was no regular organization, no constitution, no officers, no laws or agreement or rule except the ‘Golden Rule,’ and every man did what seemed right in his own eyes.”
    The Underground Railroad’s impact on the antebellum United States was profound. Apart from sporadic slave rebellions, only the Underground Railroad physically resisted the repressive laws that held slaves in bondage. The nation’s first great movement of civil disobedience since the American Revolution, it engaged thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law and the prevailing mores of their communities, and for the first time asserted the principle of personal, active responsibility for others’ human rights. By provoking fear and anger in the South, and prompting the enactment of draconian legislation that eroded the rightsof white Americans, the Underground Railroad was a direct contributing cause of the Civil War. It also gave many African Americans their first experience in politics and organizational management. And in an era when proslavery ideologues stridently asserted that blacks were better off in slavery because they lacked the basic intelligence, and even the biological ability, to take care of themselves, the Underground Railroad offered repeated proof of their courage and initiative.
    The Underground Railroad, and the broader abolition movement of which it was a part, were also a seedbed of American feminism. “Woman [is] more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the first national leader of the women’s movement, declared. “For while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the Negro there is no such privilege.” In the underground, women were for the first time participants in a political movement on an equal plane with men, sheltering and clothing fugitive slaves, serving as guides, risking reprisals against their families, and publicly insisting that their voices be heard.
    Â 
    L ike most Americans, probably, I first heard of the Underground Railroad in the form of legend. Near the community in suburban Westchester County, New York, where I was raised there was (and still is) a mainly African-American neighborhood which, a local story held, had been settled by fugitive slaves before the Civil War. Prosaic a place though it was in appearance—a few blocks of tar-shingled row houses and small, unadorned split-levels—it held a fascination for me as a symbol of a time of heroes long past. My mother, herself an activist as the national director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, more than once cited the neighborhood’s supposed fugitive founders as proof of the power of individuals to defy injustice, and to shape the world they lived in for the better.
    Over the years, I thought about the Underground Railroad from time to time. But the subject always had something impenetrable about it behind the hard sheen of myth: the stories often seemed too polished, the hideaways improbable, and the central protagonists, the fugitives themselves, frustratingly beyond reach. I knew something about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who were among the tiny handful